Friday, December 5, 2014

THE RESIDENTS at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ARTArt Review, 2006by Simon Reynolds

From the start, The Residents saw themselves as a sound and vision entity. Way ahead of punk’s
indie label revolution, the San Francisco group set up not just their own
record company, Ralph, but a do-it-all-yourself
production facility, which included, alongside studios for recording music and
graphic design, a huge sound-stage for making films.

Before they’d even released their debut album, 1973’s Meet the Residents, the band had
embarked on a movie, Vileness Fats,
intended to be the world’s first fourteen-hour musical-comedy-romance set in a
world of one-armed midgets. The project was pursued fitfully for four years
only to be abandoned in 1976. But the warehouse HQ on Grove Street did spew out a stream of
innovative and derangingly strange music videos and short films, and these, along
with footage from the aborted Vileness,
are now being honored with a MOMA retrospective.

Mixed-media performance and audio-visual malarkey were the
norm in San Francisco’s
postpunk scene. Tuxedomoon, an electronic cabaret outfit who recorded for
Ralph,

came out of Sixties underground theater, with one member
having belonged to the

legendary all-gay troupe Angels of Light,, while SF
industrial band Factrix staged mind-bending spectacles in collaboration with local
performance artists like Monte Cazazza and Mark Pauline (the robot-builder and pyrotechnician
behind Survival Research Laboratories). Punk certainly opened things up and
created a new climate in which bands like the Residents and Devo could find an audience.
But in truth the Residents were post-psychedelic rather than post-punk: the
group had been in existence since the late Sixties and had arrived in San Francisco from their
native Louisiana

just as the high tide of acid rock was ebbing. According to
Residents’ spokesman Hardy Fox (the group itself shuns interviews and has
preserved its anonymity for over thirty years), the band “sprang from the fact
that psychedelia dead-ended. The people who were doing experiments in that
direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface.”Those “people” included the Beatles, Frank
Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. Undeterred by the fact that they could barely
play instruments, The Residents wanted to pick up where their freak heroes had
left off. And, whether onstage or in their videos, they wanted imagery as weird
and wigged-out as their sounds.

The visual work does indeed closely mirror the arc of the
Residents music, (de)evolving from a lo-fi yet genuinely uncanny neo-Dada to a
high-tech but increasingly sterile kookiness. The early “promos”--scare quotes
because when they were made in the late Seventies there were hardly any places
on American TV that showed videos and nobody, except maybe the cable TV fringe,
would dare to show the Residents films--have a macabre whimsy and gorgeous grotesqueness that at
various points brings to mind the Quay Bros, Eraserhead (a late-night movie-house fave with the San Francisco
postpunk set) and the Anglo-surrealist children’s animations made by Postgate
Films (The Clangers, Bagpuss, Pogle’s Wood).InThird Reich’n’Roll (1976) the Residents
cavort in Ku Klux Klan-like head-dresses made from newspaper, pounding
percussion as their mutant cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand
Dances” plays.

The four One-Minute Movies for the sixty-second tracks
off 1980’s Commercial Album are
visual haikus as exquisitely eerie as the tunes, full of images that linger in
the memory: a female corpse cocooned in cob-webs, a rheumy-eyed geezer watching
TV on a bare mattress who suddenly levitates to the ceiling, a dead pig with
roman candles stuck between its trotters. In several of these micro-movies, The
Residents appear in their famous Fred Astaire meets Un Chien Andalou image: the elegance of top-hats, tails, and canes
disrupted by the gigantic, veiny eyeballs that completely replace their heads. A
fractured tale about a mis-shapen misfit withZelig-like traits of recurrence and ubiquity, Hello Skinny (1980) pays homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée with its black-and-white stills, the collaging of photographic and drawn material further
recalling Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty
Python.

The Residents had a parasitical-cum-parodic relationship
with mainstream pop culture, which they regarded as a new form of
totalitarianism, evil because of its banality. Hence the love/hate for the Fab
Four expressed in the cover of their debut album, a defacement of Meet the Beatles’s famous cover; hence Third Reich ‘n’Roll’stransformation ofthe entirety of Sixties pop into the soundtrack for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.
By the mid-Eighties, the group launched a massive project, the American
Composers Series, 20 albums across 20 years that would honor-through-vandalisation
the work of figures like George Gershwin and Hank Williams.(In the event, the series sputtered to a halt
after just two records). It’s as this point that things start to go awry with
the Residents output, sonically and visually: the irritatingly goofy cover of
James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” is out-dulled only by the uninspired
animations that accompany it, while The Residents’ video for their take on John Philip Sousa "Stars and Stripes” is a smug
and clunky exercise in anti-militarism (World War III rendered as an amusement
arcade shooting gallery designed by Lari Pitman and Disney: clown-face bombs,
rabbits riding on top of intercontinental missles, and so forth).

What the
later Residents work, like the flat and strangely static 2000 video for
“Constantinople”, shows is that 98 times out of 100, analog trumps digital.
Computers can create the most superficially “fanstastical” images, but because
you literally can’t believe your eyes, there’s no sense of the unheimlich, none of that “dreamed”
quality possessed by the Residents’ early work, made when the group had to get
by with hand-made props, stage sets, and costumes, with lighting and
camera-work, and above all with their own bodies.